Pankaj Mishra is a fine writer who has deepened our understanding of Indian politics, by firmly standing up to the excesses of the Indian state. He has also explored the meaning of Buddhism in our times, and has earned his place as a litterateur, editing the essays of VS Naipaul, and writing a fine novel, The Romantics. Now he has tried his hand at economics, and argued here that the west should not get too excited about the "rise" of India and China; in fact, India and China were doing fine during the 1950s and 1980s, when they had shunned market-based economics. Their embrace of globalization is not necessarily a good thing - for the west and for the Indians and Chinese.

Mishra builds his argument by pointing out that during the period 1950-1980, when Indian leaders were inspired by Harold Laski and pursued a Soviet-style model of planned economy in which the state occupied the commanding heights of the economy, the Indian economy grew 3.5% a year. Now such a growth rate may appear mouth-watering to Eurosclerotic economies, which are lucky if they grow 2% a year, but a rate of 3.5% for a poor, emerging economy is low by any reckoning. Indeed, the famous Indian economist Raj Krishna dismissed it as the "Hindu rate of growth". Mishra probably sees virtue in that modest growth rate; other economists have called it stagnation, because during that period, India's population was rising 2.5% a year, delighting only the Malthusians who wanted facts to support their theory, that a poor, large, overpopulated country cannot feed itself. Indeed, for much of the 1960s and 1970s, India depended on food aid from many countries, including the United States, which offered surplus crops under PL 480. It took the controversial Green Revolution (pdf) to fill Indian granaries, and today it is not only self-sufficient, but has begun exporting food (but more about that in a moment).

So the growth rate of 3.5% is not something India should brag about, particularly when we look at what happened afterwards. In the last decade, in fact, India has grown at double, if not triple that rate - and that has happened after India embraced globalization, and liberalized its economy from some crippling controls. (Much more needs to be done, but that's a matter for another time.) This year, economists estimate the Indian economy to grow by 9%. And over the last several years, its growth rate has ranged between 6.5% and 8%. Surely Mishra does not want India to continue to grow at the bullock-cart pace, which is admired only by European intellectuals.

To put Indian growth in perspective: when it grew at 7.5% last year, India's income rose by an amount higher than the total income of Portugal ($194 billion), Norway ($183 billion), or Denmark ($178 billion) that year. It was the equivalent of adding a rich country's economy to a very poor one. More important, India has reduced the number of people living in abject poverty, even though its population has increased significantly. Once again, facts: In 1991, 36% of India's 846 million people, or a little over 304 million people, lived on less than one dollar a day, the measure economists at the World Bank use to define absolute poverty. That number - of 304 million people - represented possibly the highest-ever agglomeration of poor people in the world in one country at any time. Ten years later, the proportion of India's poorest dropped to 26% - a decline not only of 10 percentage points, but also in absolute terms. By 2006, India's population had risen to 1.02 billion people. If the proportion of poor is still at 26%, it means 267 million people now lived in absolute poverty. What it also means is that even though India added 156 million more people to its population during that decade - a figure combining the total populations of Britain, France and Spain put together - during that period, the number of poor people in India actually fell by 37 million, or the size of Poland. Had the poverty level remained the same, there would have been 361 million poor in India. Instead, the Indian economy had lifted 94 million people out of absolute poverty during that period - that's 12 million more people than the entire population of Germany, the most populous state in the European Union. Such growth would simply have not happened if India had not put in place macroeconomic changes in 1991.

What concerns critics of India's market-oriented approach is that this growth appears to be distributed unevenly. (Fact: the gini coefficient, which measures inequality, has not changed appreciably over the last decade; it is still at 0.33, where a score of zero indicates perfect equality, and a score of 1, perfect inequality). Mishra is right in pointing out that China's gini coefficient has worsened, and at 0.48 it is probably higher than at any time, particularly before the communist revolution. Dismayed by the fact that Jung Chang's view of Mao is shaping our view of China (reviewed here and here), Mishra lauds Mao-era achievements. Even Mao is not an evil without blemish, but it is remarkable to celebrate a leader who was responsible for the so-called Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, which destroyed the Chinese countryside, killed and starved millions, and ruined countless lives, and wounded that proud country so grievously that it is still trying to recover from those horrors.

What could prompt this defence of India and China between 1950s and 1980s? It seems to me it is out of Mishra's genuine concern for equality. Rapid economic growth does make some people, and some parts of a country more prosperous than others. But the question to be asked is: are those being left behind denied access to opportunities that can make them prosperous as well? That should be the progressive agenda, not opposing the economic process that is finally lifting millions of Indians out of poverty. The pursuit of equality is a noble goal if what is being distributed is wealth; not if what's being redistributed is poverty. An extremely poor society may be "equal", but that's not necessarily a good thing, if the entire population earns two dollars a day. Rather than focusing on equality of outcomes - a concern common among many who call themselves progressive - they should think of equality of opportunity. And then watch the economies grow.

To be sure, there are a million other problems in India - it has the largest number of illiterate people in the world; despite islands of excellence, its healthcare system is unable to eliminate entirely preventable diseases in many parts of India; too many of its little girls and many boys don't complete school. It would be far better for India if its government gets off those commanding heights of the economy, and addresses these fundamental problems. Then, the kind of India that rises will be the envy of all, not just the west.